Artist Statement

As far back as I can recall I have been fascinated with the morbid and macabre. This fascination is an affirmation of death as something we will all experience through others and, eventually, ourselves. This is not admiration, but a need to understand how we cope and attempt to survive this ultimate moment. We develop complex relationships to the corpse that is left behind after a person’s death. We may be close enough to a living person to welcome their physical touch, yet after death we revile the physical touch of that person’s body. At the same time we are fascinated with the bodies of the deceased, even in states of decomposition and evisceration, possibly because we understand our own living bodies will one day be a corpse as well. Currently, my morbid curiosity is explored through themes of presence. Presence can refer to both someone who is physically present and to someone who is felt but unseen. The latter is usually ascribed to the supernatural, but it is also an evocative clue to an environment that we assemble into this feeling. For example: We often perceive old worn buildings or locations with a tragic history as being haunted. I give my viewers these clues to assemble into an impression of a haunted feeling. I work primarily in traditional relief prints because I enjoy exploring the process of transformation that occurs between drawing the image out on the block and then cutting out the image. Lines are changed, textures are added, and the image is flattened, removing the inconsistencies of a hand-drawn image. The scale of my work is often large, engaging the viewer at “life size”, to be more accessible. Although I do work with traditional methods and produce traditional prints, I also like to work with non-traditional methods of displaying my work for an engaging new twist.